Jennifer Kerns already has plans to travel to Mexico, California, and Cape Cod. After more than 30 years in the tech industry, Kerns, 60, finally hung up her hat in March. Most recently, she worked at GitHub, a Microsoft subsidiary, as a program manager and before that, she was a contractor at Microsoft for 25 years.
Kerns was already making plans to retire, but the reasons to step away from her role began to pile up in the months leading up to her decision. Nearly her entire leadership chain departed over the course of a couple years. Her youngest child was about to age out of her family’s insurance plan. And then there was AI, which became the “sole focus” of the company, she said.
“That was really it for me,” she told Fortune. “I don’t buy into AI. I think it’s a bubble that’s going to burst.”
Kerns considers herself a creative, but narratives surrounding AI’s possible negative impact on the arts isn’t her only reason for not buying into AI. It’s that she simply didn’t want to deal with it at this stage in her career.
“It’s not that I don’t think I can learn to use AI or [have a] fear of displacement,” she said. Plainly, “It offends me.”
Finding herself at a crossroads where she either picks up the technology she loathes to use or calls it quits, Kerns decided to retire, joining the nearly half of Americans who retire earlier than expected.
According to an Allianz Life study published in May, while the retirement age has stayed relatively stable over the years—hovering usually between 62 and 64 years of age —42% of Americans still retire earlier than they intended, many for reasons outside of their control.
There are usually three factors driving workers to retire early, according to Craig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research with the Employee Benefit Research Institute: Their own deteriorating health, the need to care for a parent or family member, and lastly, workplace changes. It’s this third reason that has led more tech workers in the last several years to step back from their desks and throw in the towel, Copeland told Fortune.
“The tech industry is going through a revolutionary period of moving toward AI, where they’re changing what needs of employees they have, and therefore that really causes people toward the end of their careers,” he said, “to really come to the forefront.”
How is AI pushing tech workers toward early retirement?
Steve McConnell, a retirement planning advisor and founder of Rain Dog Financial, started seeing an increase in early retirees following the onset of the pandemic. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis noted in a 2021 paper an excess of 2.4 million retirements as a result of COVID at a rate that began to deviate from and exceed the number of Baby boomers retiring.
Workers began reconsidering their priorities following a period of working from home, and spurred by an upswing in the financial markets, decided now would be a good time to call it a career.
What separates tech workers from the rest of early retirees, however, is just how often the nature of their work changes, according to McConnell. Over just the last 30 years—essentially Kern’s entire tech career—there’s been the advent of desktop personal computers, internet, mobile, cloud computing, and now AI.
“For tech people, one of the distinctive features is that the learning curve of getting up to speed on a new technology can be a lot of effort,” McConnell told Fortune. “One of the things that tech workers have to do over a few times over the course of the career, is they need to make a decision whether they want to jump onto the next tech wave and ride that or not.”
The choice to retire under these circumstances can be emotionally charged and complicated. According to Kevin Estes, a Seattle-based financial adviser and founder of Scaled Finance, his clients weighing retirement have to accept that if they leave now, “you may not be able to get back on the merry-go-round.”
Though AI has yet to produce any widespread economic productivity gains, a growing adoption of the technology could leave some workers disoriented, should they try to reenter the tech sector in the coming months or years, Estes told Fortune.
Others, like Kerns, are certain they don’t want to engage with the new wave of technology and are relieving frustration they have with AI by simply choosing not to engage with it.
“Many people believe it’s overblown,” Estes said. “They are concerned that leveraging all this AI just doesn’t work. You can get some productivity benefits, but at the end of the day, if you’re using it to create code, create systems, create processes, it may not do what you’re hoping to do.”
That’s to say nothing of the workers who may have been pushed into early retirement as a result of workforce reductions. In April, Microsoft offered its first-ever voluntary buyout to employees, opening a one-time retirement program for certain U.S. workers whose service time with the company plus their age added up to or exceeded 70. The plan reportedly targeted about 7% of Microsoft’s employees.
From what Kerns heard from her former colleagues, the voluntary retirement program helped make some people’s decisions easier, particularly employees without children.
What does early retirement mean for the tech industry?
Others, however, are more skeptical on retirement incentives and the impact of more early retirements in the tech sector at large. Estes believes companies’ retirement buyouts are cost-saving measures. Veteran workers have higher salaries, and by reducing heftier pay in favor of cheaper entry-level workers, firms can reduce the cost of labor.
As tech companies like IBM plan to triple job opportunities for entry-level workers, Kerns pointed to a lack of mentorship for these new employees should too many seasoned tech workers leave the industry prematurely. While IBM has cited building strong leadership pipelines as reason to hire for more entry-level positions, Kerns said there may not be the same levels of guidance and support from senior workers to help foster these pipelines.
Rain Dog Financial founder McConnell said the loss of seasoned employees could be bad news for the future of AI itself, as too many early retirements could represent the loss of key institutional—and industrial—knowledge about the risks associated with new technologies.
“I am concerned about the loss of judgment by losing a cohort of senior engineers at a time when AI is in its infancy and we really need guardrails on the technology,” he said. “We are at risk of losing some of the senior judgment and knowledge that really, I think, is necessary for ensuring that AI matures in a healthy way.”
But there could be economic benefits to more retirees, according to Robert Laura, cofounder of the Retirement Coaches Association. Retirees spend money on vacations and healthcare. AARP found last month that adults over 50 contributed $12.5 trillion in economic activity in 2024, and by 2060, that sum is expected to nearly double.
Moreover, people usually retire multiple times, Laura said. They quit the job representing their careers, but then find meaningful work elsewhere, in another field or through volunteering. Older adults provided $1.2 trillion in unpaid care and volunteering in 2024, according to AARP data.
“They’re happy to work for something they enjoy for less—retire from their primary career, but not from work,” Laura said.
